Once the project had some visual identity and a basic technical backbone, the next step was giving the world actual moving parts.

This was the phase where cities, authors, works, stats and factions started becoming proper gameplay entities. This also meant defining how they relate to one another, which again, required some adjustments of the data and even some design tweaks, because some interactions were still not adding up.

A lot of this phase was about building the relationships between gameplay entities and basically forming the gameplay systems. We focused on the nodes/cities and their respective personalities, which brought about their works, which needed interaction and relationships with the wider world - as they have in history.

So we went back to the design board to sort out how the projects tree would look like: which works were crucial to which fields of science, philosophy, economics etc, and which fields evolved into others or provided the foundations for yet more advanced ones. So we categorized them into tiers and domains, we selected which works will go where and had some idea on how the tree would look like.

Then, we also needed to make sure we glue the “tech tree” together with other moving parts, so developments and policies needed to enter the mix. We sorted out the requirements and unlocks of each “tech” in the tree to make sure it all glues up - of course it didn’t, so we had to go back to the content and adjust it, find ways to beat it into submission without sacrificing historical accuracy.

Then we grew tired and decided the implementation for all of this will be easy once it’s all clear so we can take a break and leave some work for the next devlog.

(January 2026)